elam: what, when, where?assets.cambridge.org/97805215/63581/excerpt/...archaeological evidence are...

1

ELAM: WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?

In order to discuss the origins and development of Elam we must first establish where the namecomes from and what it signified. This chapter examines the etymology of the name and intro-duces the reader to the changing nature of its application. It also takes up the fundamentalchronological issue which must be tackled before launching into an examination of the materialand historical evidence covered here. When do we first find Elam mentioned? How late did Elamexist? Finally, where was Elam? Seeming contradictions between epigraphic, literary andarchaeological evidence are investigated which bear on the problem of how ancient observers andmodern scholars have located Elam in their treatments of the subject. Finally, the chapter closeswith some observations on how and why the meanings of broad geographical and ethnic designa-tions often change in the course of time. For us it is important to realize that the area identifiedas Elam in one period may not have been the same as that referred to by the same name in anotherperiod. These are some of the ambiguities which must be understood before the subject of Elamcan be intelligently discussed.

What is Elam?

Elam (Fig. 1.1) is an artificial construct, a name coined by Mesopotamian scribes, gazingacross the alluvium towards the Iranian plateau, who imposed it from without on thedisparate regions of highland southwest Iran and its peoples. In Sumerian sourcesdating to the middle of the third millennium BC (see Chapter 4) the name Elam waswritten with the sumerogram NIM meaning simply ‘high’, often accompanied by thedeterminative KI denoting ‘land, country’. The Akkadian form used was normally KURelammatum or ‘land of Elam’ (Quintana 1996a: 50).

The etymology of Elam has been much discussed. Damerow and Englund suggestthat Elam ‘may be an Akkadianized rendering of both Sumerian and Elamite termsinfluenced by elûm, “to be high”’ (Damerow and Englund 1989: 1, n. 1). It was not untilthe reign of Siwe-palar-hupak, in the 18th century BC, that a name for the landdescribed by Sumerian and Akkadian scribes as Elam appears in the Elamite languageas halHatamti, hal Hatamti or Hatamti- (Vallat 1996f: 89; see also 1993a: 90–3). The lateWalther Hinz suggested that this term was composed of hal ‘land’�tamt ‘gracious lord’(1971b: 644) and it has even been suggested recently that this might be an Elamitecontraction of the Akkadian expression ala’itum matum, meaning ‘high land’(Quintana 1996a: 50), but it seems more likely that Akkadian Elamtu derivesfrom Elamite Ha(l)tamti (Vallat 1996f: 89). Be that as it may, the fact remains that the

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press0521563585 - The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian StateD. T. PottsExcerptMore information

http://www.cambridge.org/0521563585

http://www.cambridge.org


2 the archaeology of elam

Figure 1.1 Map of southwestern Iran showing the principal sites mentioned in Chapter 1.






apparently first, indigenous name for Elam did not appear until the early second mil-lennium BC and it is doubtful whether the region’s inhabitants looked on western Iranas a single, unified country or nation. In the third millennium, when our story properlybegins, the peoples of highland Iran, a disparate collection of ethnically and linguisti-cally diverse groups, never identified themselves using the rubrics Elam or Elamites.That was a name given to the uplands east of Mesopotamia by Sumerian scribes whowere simply referring to it, in a logical way, as ‘highland’. As R. Zadok has stressed, bythe late third millennium BC the Sumerian designation ELAM(.MAki) was applied to‘any highlander from the Iranian Plateau and its piedmont’ (Zadok 1987: 3).Significantly, however, the sumerogram NIM was never used by Elamite scribes whenthey wrote in Elamite, and the few cases where it is alleged to have been present haveall been rejected by M.-J. Steve, who has termed them ‘illusory’ (Steve 1992: 158–9).

Yet most people, if they have ever heard the name Elam, know of it not from thecuneiform sources of the third or second millennium BC but from scattered referencesin the Bible. Elam appears in the Old Testament Table of Nations (Gen. 10.22; see alsoSimons 1959: 27–8; Nöldeke 1874: 187–9), and an Elamite king whose name has comedown to us as Kedor-Laomer is mentioned in a later chapter of Genesis (14.1), as well.Elam figures prominently in the forty-ninth chapter of the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah49.35–39; see also Thompson 1980: 728–9; Holladay 1989: 387–9). Daniel of lion’s denfame dreamt that he was ‘at Shushan in the palace which is in the province of Elam’(Daniel 8.2), also the scene of the principal events described in the Book of Esther(Esther 1.1). And Jews from Elam, present in Jerusalem at Pentecost, are mentioned inthe New Testament (Acts 2.9).

The late appearance of an ‘indigenous’ name for Elam in Elamite sources and the pos-sibility that Elam might even be a loanword from another language may seem bizarre,but throughout history people and regions have been identified by names other thanthose which they and their inhabitants themselves used, and comparable examples ofwhat could be termed ‘imposed ethnicity’ abound in the more recent past. The Inuit ofCanada and Greenland, whose name means simply ‘the people’ in their own language,have been known for centuries by the term ‘Eskimo’, a European corruption of a NativeAmerican term meaning ‘eaters of raw flesh’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Similarly theHuron were so named by French colonists. The French term huron means a ‘rustic ruralresident’ (Roosens 1989: 99) and even though the Huron were part of a larger groupcalling themselves ‘Wendat’, the name Huron was eventually adopted by the Wendatand continues to be used to this day. Moreover, it is instructive to note that neither thedemise of the Huron language nor the eradication of most Huron traditional customshave diminished the intensity of current feelings of Huron ethnic identity (Roosens1989: 96).

One thing is, in any case, certain. The available written sources which pre-date the18th century BC give absolutely no indication that the diverse groups inhabiting theIranian Zagros and plateau regions ever identified themselves by a common term as allembracing as Elam. Dozens of names of regions and population groups (see Chapter 5)attested in the late third millennium sources (principally in the Ur III period,

Elam: what, when, where? 3






2100–2000 BC) give us a good impression of the heterogeneity of the native peoples ofwestern Iran, all of whom were simply subsumed under the Sumerian rubric NIM andthe Akkadian term KUR elammatum. Nor did the peoples of these diverse regions allspeak a common language which, for lack of an indigenous term, we may call Elamite.Judging by personal names in cuneiform sources, the linguistic make-up of southwest-ern Iran was heterogeneous and the language we call Elamite was but one of a numberof languages spoken in the highlands to the east of Mesopotamia. Yet it is not the pre-ponderance of Sumerian, Akkadian and Amorite personal names in texts from Susa, aproduct of long periods of political and cultural dependency and the widespread use ofAkkadian, which justifies our speaking of linguistic heterogeneity in southwesternIran. Rather, it is the plethora of indigenous, non-Elamite languages attested to mainlyby the extant corpus of Iranian (geographically, not linguistically) personal names inMesopotamian cuneiform sources. Individuals are known from Anshan, Shimashki,Zabshali, Marhashi, Sapum, Harshi, Shig(i)rish, Zitanu, Itnigi, and Kimash with nameswhich cannot be etymologized as Elamite (Zadok 1991: 226–30).

When did Elam exist?

As we shall see in Chapter 4, there is no certainty that the sign NIM was used byMesopotamian scribes to refer to Elam until the middle of the third millennium BC.Some of the earlier occurrences of the sign might have had the meaning Elam, but thereis no way of demonstrating this conclusively. On the other hand, the lack of aMesopotamian term for the peoples of the eastern highlands in no way implies that thearea was uninhabited, but until we find the word NIM/Elam we cannot prove any linkbetween the archaeological assemblages of the region and the later Elamites. For thisreason, if we adopt a ‘minimalist’ position, as is done here, we cannot in all honestyspeak of Elam before c. 2600–2500 BC.

How late did Elam exist? This is less clear-cut than might seem to be the case froma perusal of some of the standard texts on the subject. The Assyrian conquest of Susain the 7th century BC is seen by most scholars as the great watershed which marks theend of Elamite history (e.g. Schroeder 1925; König 1938), and the rise of the Persianempire is often taken as the beginning of a new era. Thus, G.G. Cameron’s 1936 Historyof Early Iran explicitly sought to present ‘in a comprehensive fashion the history of theIranian plateau before Cyrus attained mastery’ (Cameron 1936: vii). Although hebelieved that ‘Elam still had an important role to play’ in the Achaemenid empire, W.Hinz also used the fall of Susa to the Assyrians and the rise of the Medes and Persiansas the cut-off point in his synthesis of Elamite history and archaeology (Hinz 1972: 160),as did E. Carter and M.W. Stolper, who offer just three pages on Elam during theAchaemenid, Seleucid and Parthian periods in their synthesis of Elamite politicalhistory and archaeology (Carter and Stolper 1984: 57–9).

The approach taken here is quite different. Elam’s absorption into the Achaemenidempire and its legacy in the Achaemenid period in no way mark the phase at whichone can legitimately conclude an assessment of Elam’s history and archaeology.







Elam’s boundaries and political status may have changed considerably from what theywere during the third millennium BC, but it is clear from a reading of, for example,the late Babylonian texts which discuss the numerous incursions of Elamite troops,some of whom were commanded by officers with Elamite names (Chapter 10), thatthe region of Elymais and its people the Elymaeans, mentioned in Greek and Latinsources, certainly represented latter-day incarnations of Elam and the Elamites.Similarly, during the early Islamic era we continue to find the name Elam used todenote an ecclesiastical province in what is today the Khuzistan province of south-western Iran (Chapter 11).

Elam was no less an entity with a particular linguistic and cultural character in thepost-Assyrian period than it had been in more remote antiquity. At no point in Elam’shistory were its boundaries fixed, and Elam’s absorption by the Persian empire no moresignalled its demise than had its suppression by the Old Akkadian or Ur III empires inthe late third millennium BC. These and other episodes of political diminution cer-tainly meant that Elam figured less prominently in written sources, but the consistentreappearance of Elam following periods of political reversal show that the essentialindependence – linguistically as well as culturally – of Elam and the Elamites is a phe-nomenon of incredible longevity. Elam and the Elamites periodically underwent aprocess of transformation until the disappearance of the name from Nestorian eccle-siastical sources well after the Islamic conquest. After that, it was the work of nine-teenth- and twentieth-century scholars to rediscover and recreate the many Elams ofthe more distant past.

Where was Elam?

In 1667 an East India Company agent named Samuel Flower made the first copies ofcuneiform signs (Fig. 1.2) at the Persian Achaemenid city of Persepolis and at nearbyNaqsh-i Rustam. Later, it was realized that some of these belonged to the Elamiteversion of a trilingual inscription in Old Persian, the Babylonian dialect of Akkadianand Elamite (Rogers 1900: 74–83; Pallis 1954: 24). Even if the signs were not yet recog-nized as Elamite, their copies could be said to represent the first tangible evidence ofElam to have been found outside the pages of the Bible. It took more than century,however, before Carsten Niebuhr recognised in 1778 that the Persepolitan inscriptionswere written in three different languages. Following this realization it became conven-tional to refer to the Elamite column as the ‘second type’ of Achaemenid inscription,and to designate the language represented by it as Elamite, Susian or Scythian (Reiner


Figure 1.2 Samuel Flower’s copy of an Achaemenid Elamite inscription (after Rogers 1900/I: 75).






1969: 54). Although the nineteenth century witnessed the documentation of numeroustrilingual Achaemenid inscriptions (Pallis 1954: 52–3), as well as many attempts attheir decipherment, the Elamite versions of these texts were not satisfactorily deci-phered until 1890 when F.H. Weissbach published his PhD dissertation on them (laterappearing in revised form as Weissbach 1911).

The fact that the first Elamite texts found were discovered in the highlands of Farsprovince ought to have pointed the way towards the recognition of the highland natureof Elam, but here an accident of archaeological discovery came into play. In 1813 JohnMalcolm Kinneir published an extensive description of the site of Shush (Pl. 1.1) inlowland Khuzistan, arguing against older authorities that this was the site of BiblicalShushan, rather than Shushtar, another town in Khuzistan with a name similar toShushan (Kinneir 1813: 99ff.). Opinion on this point remained divided for many years(see Forbiger 1844: 585 for a bibliography of the dispute into the mid-1840s). A.H.Layard favoured the identification of Shush with both the Susa of the Greek and Romanauthors and with Shushan of the Bible, whereas H.C. Rawlinson, while accepting theidentity of Shush and classical Susa, held that a site called Shushan, north of Shushtar,was the site of Daniel’s dream (Layard 1842: 104; 1846: 61). When W.K. Loftus exca-vated the first bricks and clay cones with Elamite inscriptions at Shush in 1852,however, including amonst other things remnants of a trilingual inscription of


Plate 1.1 Aerial view of Susa (from an original in the Susa Museum).






Artaxerxes II (404–359 BC) – identified by some with King Ahasuerus of the Book ofEsther (other scholars believe Biblical Ahasuerus to have been Xerxes, e.g. Heltzer1994) – mentioning the palace of Darius which had burned in the lifetime of ArtaxerxesI as well as the new palace built by Artaxerxes II, there was no longer any doubt aboutthe identity of modern Shush and Biblical Shushan (Curtis 1993: 22, 31–2), and indeedthis was the basis for the resumption of investigations at the site by the French expe-ditions (Dieulafoy 1888; 1893; see also Harper, Aruz and Tallon 1992: 20–4) of the late19th century (Pl. 1.2).

By extension, therefore, there could be no doubt that the name Elam referred toKhuzistan, for did not Daniel dream that he was ‘at Shushan in the palace which is inthe province of Elam’ (Daniel 8.2)? Of course, the controversy over the identificationof Shushan and by extension the ‘solution’ of the problem of Elam’s location happenedlong before cuneiform scholars had realized that the sumerogram NIM implied a high-land rather than a lowland setting for Elam. Yet confirmation of the lowland identifi-cation of Elam seemed to be provided by extra-Biblical sources, such as the eighthcentury Armenian translation of Cl. Ptolemy’s Geography by Moses of Khorene, wherewe read, ‘A land of Asia is that of the Elymaeans, that is Khuzastan, which the Greekscall Sosanik, after the city Sosan’ (Marquart 1901: 137).


Plate 1.2 Château Susa, the fortified excavation house begun on the Acropole by Jacques de Morganin 1898.






A very different notion, emphasizing the distinction between Elam and Susiana, i.e.the district of Susa, can be found, however, in other sources. After describing Susis(Susiana) and an adjacent part of Babylonia, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote, ‘Aboveboth, on the north and towards the east, lie the countries of the Elymaei and theParaetaceni, who are predatory peoples and rely on the ruggedness of their mountains’(Geog. xv.3.12). Thus, it is clear that Elymais (the land of the Elymaei, as the Elamiteswere called in the last centuries BC), and Susiana were viewed by Strabo as two differ-ent geographical regions (see also Hoffmann 1880: 133). Moreover, although laterJewish writers, such as Sa’adya Gaon (c. AD 985) and Benjamin of Tudela (AD 1169) fol-lowed the Book of Daniel in equating Khuzistan with Elam, the Talmud scrupulouslydistinguished lowland Be Huzae, or Khuzistan, from Elam (Neubauer 1868: 325, 380;Obermeyer 1929: 205).

In the early 1970s inscribed bricks were discovered at the archaeological site ofTal-i Malyan near Shiraz in the highlands of Fars province which proved that it was theancient city of Anshan (Reiner 1973a). This led, several years later, to a complete revi-sion of thinking on the location of Elam, spearheaded by the French scholar F. Vallat,who argued that the centre of Elam lay at Anshan and in the highlands around it, andnot at Susa in lowland Khuzistan (1980a). The periodic political incorporation of thelowlands, and the importance of the city of Susa, had given the impression to theauthors of Daniel and Esther that Elam was centred around the site and coterminouswith Khuzistan. The preponderance of inscriptions written in Elamite at Anshan, andthe overwhelming domination of texts written in Akkadian at Susa, with largelySemitic personal names, suggested to Vallat that Elam was centred in the highlands,not in lowland Susiana. One could even suggest that ancient observers had applied thepars pro toto principle (Eilers 1982: 10) when it came to the use of Elam in the Bible,whereby a name which had originally designated only an area around Anshan in Farscame to be used for a geographically much more extensive state which held sway overareas well outside the original Elamite homeland. In order to distinguish between thesetwo Elams, one might even be tempted to use terms like Elam Minor (for the originalElamite homeland in Fars) and Elam Major (for the wider state, which sometimesapproached the status of an empire, created by the Elamites).

In fact, this would be wrong, and it is equally misleading to suggest that Elam meantthe highlands of Fars with its capital city Anshan. For as outlined above, Elam is notan Iranian term and has no relationship to the conception which the peoples of high-land Iran had of themselves. They were Anshanites, Marhashians, Shimashkians,Zabshalians, Sherihumians, Awanites, etc. That Anshan played a leading role in thepolitical affairs of the various highland groups inhabiting southwestern Iran is clear.But to argue that Anshan is coterminous with Elam is to misunderstand the artificial-ity and indeed the alienness of Elam as a construct imposed from without on thepeoples of the southwestern highlands of the Zagros mountain range, the coast of Farsand the alluvial plain drained by the Karun-Karkheh river system. For although cunei-form sources often distinguish Susians, i.e. the inhabitants of Susa, from Anshanites,this in no way contradicts the notion that, from the Mesopotamian perspective, the







easterners – lowlanders and highlanders alike – were all Elamites in the direction ofSusa and beyond.

Conclusion

All too often we take for granted the identity and ethnicity of the archaeological andhistorical cultures which we study, without considering whether discrepancies existbetween our definitions and the self-definitions of the peoples being studied. In the caseof Elam, it is now clear that we are dealing with a notion imposed by Mesopotamianscribes, not one which had any basis in indigenous notions of ethnic and linguistic self-definition. Diverse groups in southwestern Iran were subsumed under this foreignlabel, but at a certain point the label was adopted for it clearly served a purpose in a dif-ferent context of self-definition. Elam is both a name and a concept. How these changedthrough time will be explored in the chapters which follow.

In a recent study of Austrian identity, Franz Mathis notes, ‘When the term “Austria”in the form of Ostarrichi was used in a document in 996, it referred to a certain area intoday’s Lower Austria, which the people used to call Ostarrichi, a land in the east. Atthat time this land was ruled by the house of Babenberg. Later on, the name was grad-ually applied to all the lands that the Babenbergs acquired on both sides of the Danubebefore the end of their rule in 1246. It was not, however, applied to Styria, which hadbeen added in 1192 . . . it was not extended over the lands that the Habsburgs acquiredduring the following centuries: these retained their former names such as Carinthia,Tyrol and – much later – Salzburg’ (Mathis 1997: 20–1). Mathis goes on to analyze theeventual substitution of the name Austria (Österreich) for that of Habsburg, the verylate adoption of that name for areas to the west and south of the original Ostarrichidomains, and the feelings of identity, or lack of identity, with the geographical entityso named on the part of the people who lived there. Much of this analysis of Austriaand Austrian identity strikes a chord in anyone who has grappled with the problem ofdefining Elam in its various forms through time and will hopefully do the same inreaders new to the subject as they work their way through this book.







2

ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE AND RESOURCES

The approximate geographical boundaries of Elam are set out in this chapter, and the topographicand environmental zones within those boundaries are described. The reader is introduced to theclimate, rainfall and hydrology of the relevant portions of Fars, Khuzistan and Luristan in south-western Iran. Evidence for differences between the climate of the past and that of the present isexamined and in that context the possibility of anthropogenic changes to the Elamite landscapeis raised. Finally, the animal, mineral and vegetable resources of the region are surveyed, showingjust what earlier inhabitants of southwestern Iran had at their disposal.

Introduction

It is important in any regional archaeological or historical study to have an apprecia-tion of what the climate, environment, land-use potential and natural resources of theregion under study (Fig. 2.1) were like by the start of the period in which one is inter-ested. Although the geographical limits of Elam changed through time, we shall con-sider the Elamite area at its greatest extent to have extended from Kermanshahprovince in the northwest to the eastern border of Fars in the southeast. For the sakeof convenience we shall take as the region’s northern boundary the ‘Royal’ or ‘GreatKhorassan’ Road leading from Baghdad in the west to Kermanshah, Kangavar andHamadan (and eventually Qazvin and Teheran) in the east. The western edge of theinterior desert basin – the true Iranian ‘plateau’, as distinct from the mountains of theZagros chain – may be taken to form the northeastern boundary of our area, while tothe southeast a lack of archaeological exploration makes it difficult to define theborder, but later historical evidence suggests that a true cultural boundary existed sep-arating Kerman in the east from Fars in the west. This theoretical eastern boundary ofElam was probably located further west than Bandar Abbas, for a genuine culturalborder seems to exist between Darab and Sirjan, separating Fars from Kerman (on thechanging boundary between Fars and Kerman, see Aubin 1977: 285–6). Along the coastof Fars we know of a second millennium Elamite cultural presence near modernBushire (Vallat 1984a) but whether the lower coast of what is today Laristan andTangistan was culturally within the Elamite orbit at any time we do not know (seePohanka 1986 for an introduction to the archaeology of the region). Politically theentire area just described encompasses most of the former ostans (provinces) ofKermanshah, Ahwaz and Shiraz (see Fisher 1968: Fig. 2). Here we shall briefly examine






elam: what, when, where?assets.cambridge.org/97805215/63581/excerpt/...archaeological evidence are...

Documents